I assume that the servers involved run Gentoo Linux, so the down time reflects poorly on Gentoo.

Only to clueless people though. There are tons of possible reasons and the linux distro in use (if at all) is not the most prominent one._________________Nothing is secure / Security is always a trade-off with usability / Do not assume anything / Trust no-one, nothing / Paranoia is your friend / Think for yourself

I assume that the servers involved run Gentoo Linux, so the down time reflects poorly on Gentoo.

Only to clueless people though. There are tons of possible reasons and the linux distro in use (if at all) is not the most prominent one.

Usually businesses are run by clueless people, which could be why they tend to run RHEL instead of Gentoo.

Most companies tend to run commercial distros like RHEL because they get gaurantees in writing that problems will be fixed within a certain timeframe. It doesn't matter if they never actually need this service or not, they need it to be there just in case they need it.

RedHat supply a solution to a demand. That's what (good) businesses do.

It's also a disservice to all the work that RedHat has contributed to open source over the years to pretend that those who work purely for the fun of it are somehow better than RedHat. I'm sure there are many contributors doing it just for fun who would love to be in the position of RedHat employees, getting paid for it too._________________http://gentoo-wiki.com :: http://lug.org.uk :: http://www.linux.org/groups/ :: User Blogs

Most companies tend to run commercial distros like RHEL because they get gaurantees in writing that problems will be fixed within a certain timeframe. It doesn't matter if they never actually need this service or not, they need it to be there just in case they need it.

RedHat supply a solution to a demand. That's what (good) businesses do.

It's also a disservice to all the work that RedHat has contributed to open source over the years to pretend that those who work purely for the fun of it are somehow better than RedHat. I'm sure there are many contributors doing it just for fun who would love to be in the position of RedHat employees, getting paid for it too.

They have done a great deal, but I do not think RHEL is inherently better than Gentoo Linux such that it would justify that businesses use RHEL instead of Gentoo Linux. The fact that businesses use RHEL means that any fixes that a business would have done with Gentoo that could potentially benefit all Gentoo users never happens and instead is done by RedHat and sent upstream. Gentoo only sees it after it trickles down from upstream and with the limited resources of Gentoo's developers, that can take a while.

With all of the money that businesses pay to Redhat, I think that they could probably afford to have their own in-house team to work on whatever distribution they choose to use.

I assume that the servers involved run Gentoo Linux, so the down time reflects poorly on Gentoo.

Only to clueless people though. There are tons of possible reasons and the linux distro in use (if at all) is not the most prominent one.

Usually businesses are run by clueless people, which could be why they tend to run RHEL instead of Gentoo.

And your point is?
(Cluess) CEO/CFO/CIO-alphabet soup people deciding between Gentoo/Puppy/Vector-linux based on website availability for the OS to be used on their buiness servers?_________________Nothing is secure / Security is always a trade-off with usability / Do not assume anything / Trust no-one, nothing / Paranoia is your friend / Think for yourself

I hate it when peopple bring up the "official" thing. In my experience the Gentoo Forums are unavailable just as frequently as Gentoo Wiki. Having Gentoo Wiki as an official project is not a magic bullet.

Here is a question. Why are these resources going down so frequently? I assume that the servers involved run Gentoo Linux, so the down time reflects poorly on Gentoo.

It has not so much to do with the servers, as the www.gentoo.org website is practically always available. The problem is more the forums software, as there isn't really any open source package that doing this really well, especially at the volume we need. The forums team is doing a great job, all things considered, into making phpBB usable at all for our needs. I don't think the unofficial wiki has quite the amount of traffic and extensive database that our forums have, so I don't think the comparison is really fair._________________"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

I really wouldn't put so much faith in such discussions. This isn't the first time an official wiki has been discussed. It's happened many times before and nothing has ever come of it. I doubt anything will ever come of this discussion either.

There are 2 major problems with the official wiki concept:
1) Developers can never agree what the wiki should contain, what the restrictions should be and who would put in the day-to-day work of maintaining such a wiki and keeping it spam free.

I hate it when peopple bring up the "official" thing. In my experience the Gentoo Forums are unavailable just as frequently as Gentoo Wiki. Having Gentoo Wiki as an official project is not a magic bullet.

Here is a question. Why are these resources going down so frequently? I assume that the servers involved run Gentoo Linux, so the down time reflects poorly on Gentoo.

It has not so much to do with the servers, as the www.gentoo.org website is practically always available. The problem is more the forums software, as there isn't really any open source package that doing this really well, especially at the volume we need. The forums team is doing a great job, all things considered, into making phpBB usable at all for our needs. I don't think the unofficial wiki has quite the amount of traffic and extensive database that our forums have, so I don't think the comparison is really fair.

Are the forums using a PostgreSQL backend or a MySQL backend? I understand that phpBB supports PostgreSQL, so if they is not using that, switching might help.

I really wouldn't put so much faith in such discussions. This isn't the first time an official wiki has been discussed. It's happened many times before and nothing has ever come of it. I doubt anything will ever come of this discussion either.

There are 2 major problems with the official wiki concept:
1) Developers can never agree what the wiki should contain, what the restrictions should be and who would put in the day-to-day work of maintaining such a wiki and keeping it spam free.

There is agreement now, and we are forming a team. So far 10 people, both developers and users, have volunteered.

AllenJB wrote:

2) Nobody makes any moves towards implementing the wiki.

This is exactly what we are doing now._________________"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

Well, if it would finally be up and official, I'd volunteer for some day2day work, hoping there'll be a better backup-strategy than the unofficial one has/had. I hate it, when I spent a lot of work, all of a sudden it's gone and I can't do anything about it.

Related to restrictions, I'd say registered users only, linked against the userdb of the forums and 20 non-OTW-posts are needed to start on the wiki. That should keep most of the spammers out, espacially if you link forum-bans to the wiki-accs and the other way round.

I haven't been able to connect to it for a few days. I will look into ways to grab it from the Google cache and/or other archives tonight just in case....unless someone already has an archive of it or someone knows what is going on?

While it's not an official wiki and there are still the official docs on Gentoo.org, I have still found it quite useful in the past.

For whatever reason, the site seems to go down this time of year as the gsoc gets underway.

As for the "official" gentoo wiki, it seems to have wavered due most probably to a lack of manpower_________________Brian
Porthole, the Portage GUI frontend irc@freenode: #gentoo-guis, #porthole, Blog
layman, gentoolkit, CoreBuilder, esearch...

More like a lack of will by the supreme beings to let us mere mortals contribute. Any moron can throw up a mediawiki installation in literally minutes. 'Man power' has just become apologist for uselessness._________________

juniper wrote:

you experience political reality dilation when travelling at american political speeds. it's in einstein's formulas. it's not their fault.

As per usual, Gentoo has some of the best documentation around; for example. And more good news, you can access it right now. The trouble is you can't be sure for how long gentoo-wiki.com will be up. I don't care whether our wiki is official or not, I just want reliable access, please.